RONNIE DUGGER

Reagan in History

The presidents stand among us in history according to the parts
they played and the effects they had on the dominant tendencies and
changes that swept through their arbitrary terms of office.

Washington's greatness among us is rooted in his tenacious
generalship against the British and then his refusal to be the king,
not in anything he did as president (indeed, Hamilton was effectively
the president when Washington bore the title). Jefferson's greatness
abides in his writing the Declaration of Independence, his powerful
influence through Madison in the adoption of the Bill of Rights, and,
when president, his reversal of the royalist import of the Alien and
Sedition laws. Yet both (and Madison, as well) stand shamed and
disgraced in history for their ownership and exploitation of
slaves.

Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, in the main a wartime
expediency, was no secure expression of his beliefs -- he wanted to
send the blacks back to Africa. And neither the eloquence of his
great speeches nor his epochal assassination erase from his standing
in history the truth (as it is embodied, for instance, in Edmund
Wilson's impassioned preface to Patriotic Gore) that Lincoln did not
vigorously resist the coming of the Civil War -- that when, for
instance, he sent troops to Fort Sumter his melancholy fatalism was
acting as a major cause of the war.

Much of the credit for the New Deal's life-transforming changes
belongs, not to Franklin Roosevelt, but to Eleanor and to the likes
of Paul Douglas, who gave us Social Security. Roosevelt's part in
World War II, a key factor in the shape and destiny of the modern
world, does not extirpate from his record his shameful turning the
shipful of Jews at our shores back into Europe, and then his
abandonment of the Jews of Europe to their slaughter in the course of
that war.

Nor can Harry Truman's election-strategy lip service in 1948 to
national health insurance and civil rights for blacks ever outweigh
on the scales of history his Hiroshima and Nagasaki, his needlessly
making our country the only one, so far, that has exploded nuclear
weapons on the helpless and innocent inhabitants of cities.

I shall be advancing fairly soon my own final assays of Lyndon
Johnson simply because my own probable life-span requires that I do
so; and those of us from Texas have ready-enough opinions of the two
Bushes whom we and the country have suffered. On the moral truths
about the presidents that matter the most and last the longest, not
enough has come out yet, nor has enough time passed to let our
opinions form free of our own involvements, for us to judge the
recent Presidents with more than tentative confidence. We should not
begrudge those who admired Ronald Reagan's personal charm,
reactionary flair, and mean-minded conservatism their declarations of
his greatness in the midst of their grief. Still, all those
post-mortem adulations of Reagan, whipped up in the mass media and
drummed home on the TV, require some balancing at once, before his
admirers dynamite Mount Rushmore and erect a gigantic megalith to him
in its place.

There is real point and value, first, in contesting the
attribution of the collapse of the Soviet Union to him. The Democrats
and the Republicans fought the Cold War together and all the
post-World War II presidents of both parties fought it in many ways,
in Korea, in Vietnam, often opportunistically and sometimes to the
point of dishonor, with the sweat and gore of soldiers who were
Democrats, Republicans and nonpolitical. Giving the credit for the
collapse of communism to Reagan is tainted not only with the partisan
purpose of deifying one's own ideology, but also latently by the same
attribution of pro-communism to the Democrats that Martin Dies of
Texas and Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin fashioned into historic careers.
What should be granted, and gracefully, is the vital importance of
Reagan's role as he peered through the thicket of his own rhetoric to
discern the humanity of the Russian people, befriend and listen to
Mikhail Gorbachev, and postulate that together they could make
co-existence work.

Robert Kaiser, spotting Gorbachev at Reagan's funeral in
Washington on June 10, wrote in the Washington Post that he "had
flown from Moscow to pay respects to Nancy Reagan and to the man with
whom he changed the course of history." That evening at the Russian
Embassy, Kaiser reported, Gorbachev gave "a kind of personal eulogy"
to Reagan.

By 1986, remember, Reagan, a militaristic hawk who scorned detente
and arms control, had launched Star Wars and crushed the Nuclear
Freeze Movement in the United States while placing multiple-warhead
nuclear missiles in Europe. "By Gorbachev's account," Kaiser
reported, "it was his [Gobachev's] early successes on the
world stage that convinced the Americans that they had to deal with
him and to match his fervor for arms control and other agreements
that could reduce East-West tensions."

"All that talk that somehow Reagan's arms race forced Gorbachev to
look for some arms reductions, etc., that's not serious," Gorbachev
said. "The Soviet Union could have withstood any arms race ... And we
both knew what kind of weapons we each had. There were mountains of
nuclear weapons."

Gorbachev undertook glasnost and economic and political reforms in
the Soviet Union, he said, not because of US military intimidation,
but because his own country "was being stifled by the lack of
freedom. ... We were increasingly behind the West, which ... was
achieving a new technological era, a new kind of productivity. ...
And I was ashamed for my country -- perhaps the country with the
richest resources on earth, and we couldn't provide toothpaste for
our people." Gorbachev's puzzling and stubborn insistence on
retaining in the Soviet system something he called communism sank him
with his own people once he had freed them. But while he was at the
very top of that system he turned against the murderous
totalitarianism and the dictatorial economy that it had become.

Reagan "decided to be a peacemaker" just as Gorbachev, who wanted
to be one, too, came to power, Kaiser quotes Gorbachev as saying. "A
particularly positive influence on him -- more than anyone else --
was Nancy Reagan," Gorbachev said. "She deserves a lot of credit for
that."

In 1986 in Geneva the two men signed a declaration that nuclear
war was unthinkable. "That," Gorbachev said to the group in
Washington, "was the beginning of hope." Gorbachev conducted a press
conference in Geneva seated in the midst of his fellow members of the
Politburo. Listening to the translation through earphones, seated
about 10 or 12 feet in front of him, I studied and heard him
carefully there for about two hours. The dessicated communist
ideologues to his left and right -- all males, of course -- said
nothing, sat stiff and tense, while from their very midst Mikhail
Gorbachev cast out into the world such an outpouring of spontaneous,
luminous, flexible, reasonable and humanistic approaches and
positions as none of us had ever heard from a Soviet leader. He, this
one man who had been appointed the dictator of the Soviet Union, was
opening it up from within, and he, this one man with a continent on
his forehead, was going to make peace with the West.

I drove back across France to the writers' colony in Cassis where
my wife Patricia Blake and I were staying. Waking her up, I said to
her, "Gorbachev is a great man." Her brilliant journalistic and
literary career has helped illuminate the rottenness of the Soviet
system and the courage of the writers and artists who resisted it, so
she was quite taken aback. She'd have to wait and see about that.
Without explanation I have just asked her, 18 years later, "Do you
believe that Mikhail Gorbachev is a great man in history?" and she
has exclaimed in reply: "Yes!"

On the newsstands the Weekly Standard calls Reagan "The Great
Liberator," and The Economist, on its cover, calls him "The man who
beat communism." Reagan and Gorbachev ended the Cold War, which was
hellbent for nuclear holocaust. But Gorbachev is the great liberator,
the man who beat communism.

And what else should be said? Ah, here's the downside.

Reagan initiated and launched the consolidation of the domination
of the US by gigantic multinational corporations. He relentlessly
hawked the ideology that the federal government is the problem, not
the solution, proposing thereby to strip the people of the country of
that very government, our only instrument of interest and defense
strong enough to govern those very same rapacious
corporations.Turning from a liberal into a reactionary as soon as he
got rich from acting, he predictably and consistently favored the
rich over the poor in tax, spending, and every other governmental
policy. He intended to totally abolish Social Security. One of the
things I'm proudest of concerning my 1983 book about him is that from
his own radio broadcasts in the 1970s, which I had obtained by hook
if not by crook, I nailed him (especially with the Congress) as a
sworn enemy of the social insurance and medical care system without
which a huge portion of older Americans would be abandoned, very
poor, and as sick as nature chose.

That's one set of things. The other thing, equally noxious though
only in one realm, is what Reagan did, below the radar of public
attention, to television and radio. Through Mark Fowler and his other
appointments to the FCC Reagan abolished the fairness doctrine, which
required the networks and stations to be fair -- to give someone
unfairly attacked the right to reply.

The people own the airways. We ought to be using them for vital
public education and debate. Instead we have let a few gigantic
conglomerates use networks of the stations to sell us products while
treating our brains as greedballs and our elections as horse races.
The result two decades later is an evolutionary maladaptation of
democracy from which the US may never recover. The Fox network is the
flagrant precursor of the pollution of all the airways with
deliberately slanted, deliberately inflammatory corporate and
right-wing special pleading, the very pollution that was the foul
intent and purpose of Reagan's abolition of the fairness doctrine.
Nothing restrains or rebukes the all-day, all-evening reactionary
cant of the Fox network because there is no fairness doctrine.

Reagan fought for what he believed in. As Gorbachev has also said
since Reagan died, "he was sincere." To win his points, though, he
lied frequently and spun out fairy tales as if he were Walt Disney.
He invaded left-leaning little Grenada (can anyone remember the
pretext?). And in the Iran-Contra affair he dishonored and disgraced
the presidency, violating acts of Congress and misappropriating
federal money, clearly impeachable offenses.

On balance, Reagan played a vital and original role in the ending
of the Cold War, violated his oath of office and the Constitution in
the Iran-Contra matter, fostered the domination of the American
government by transnational corporations and enabled the domination
of the collective mind of the American people by TV and radio
networks whose owners are now the commanding propagandists of the
American system.

How accountable he will be held for his failings in the longest
run depends, I think, on whether our present condition, which is
crypto-fascist, is permitted to descend next November further toward
or altogether into all-out militaristic fascism. Perhaps as a people
we can pull back from the Reagan era and win some more time to try to
save ourselves from the federally sanctioned propaganda,
socio-ethical debasements, and wars of aggression that Reagan and his
successors have wrought in the once-shining name of the United
States. Maybe Reagan's luck, as well as our own, will hold and we'll
take back the country in November. But if we don't I believe that
Reagan will be damned in history as the most important of the killers
of the American democracy during the long, darkening turn into the
Third Millennium that began with his election.

Ronnie Dugger, the founding editor of The Texas Observer, wrote
The Politician: The Life and Times of Lyndon Johnson (W.W. Norton
1982) and On Reagan: The Man and His Presidency (McGraw-Hill 1983). A
shorter version of this appeared in The Texas Observer. Copyright
2004 Ronnie Dugger.